I don't think it can really be solved by the call recipient (end user) alone.
My "home" number is from VOIP provider and I set it up so that anyone not on the whitelist is prompted to press a button to be connected and my phone will ring. If they don't press anything they are transferred to a voicemail.
This significantly reduces spam calls but doesn't eliminate them completely. There is a local religious "charity" organization (or organizations, I never had any relationship with them) that often results in 1-2 minute voicemails that are pre-recorded messages. Some of them even start with "Please don't block our number", can you believe it??? I blocked about 20 numbers for them but it is a losing proposition.
I really don't want to disconnect calls when no buttons are pressed. There are some legitimate pre-recorded calls, like credit card fraud warnings etc.
My cell phone was fairly immune from this until recently. Lately I've been receiving robocall messages in Chinese language about my bank account being breached or a package waiting for me at the embassy, sometimes more than once a day (same for my office phone that is not listed anywhere). 2 days ago it was another robocall from "FBI", more than once a day.
The thing with the cell phone you can't really reject a call even if you wanted to. If you reject it just gets transferred to a voicemail.
So I am convinced the only real way to fix this is on the phone service provider end with user being able to access their incoming calls online and mark them as "spam". Providers then will have some sort of shared database for this.
This brings me to this question: can phone service provider actually "tag" a phone call using something other than caller ID that we all know can be spoofed? I am sure service provider has access to more information than caller ID. I think receiving provider would at least know what provider calls come from (i.e. AT&T would know call comes from Verizon or EvilCommunicationsInc) in addition to caller ID. But is there anything else they can use to "tag" call originator and block it? Because blocking all the calls from EvilCommunicationsInc is not a viable solution (even though it is probably possible).
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